标题: 2022.08.13作为印度的入门书，应该读些什么？ [打印本页] 作者: shiyi18 时间: 2022-8-14 20:43 标题: 2022.08.13作为印度的入门书，应该读些什么？ The Economist reads | India
What to read as an introduction to India
Our Asia editor picks six books spanning 3,000 years of a wonderfully bewildering country
[UNVERIFIED CONTENT] Daily life scene in light and shadows with a woman carrying a bucket and another woman drawing a kollam in front of the door of a colorful yellow house in Pondicherry (now Puducherry), an Indian Union territory enclave in Tamil Nadu, India.
Aug 13th 2022
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This article is part of our Summer reads series. Visit our collection to discover “The Economist reads” guides, guest essays and more seasonal distractions.
On august 15th India celebrates the 75th anniversary of its independence from the British. Yet while the Indian republic may be young, Indian civilisation is thousands of years old. And it is among the most diverse in the world. India’s 1.4bn people speak nearly two dozen official languages (and hundreds of others), worship every major religion and many smaller ones, and eat a huge variety of local cuisines (there is no such thing as “Indian food”). Some parts of the country boast gdp per person high enough to put them on par with upper-middle-income countries, while others are more deprived than some of the poorest nations on Earth. It is for these reasons that the country remains, for both foreigners and Indians, an astonishingly complex place, one that nobody could ever claim to fully comprehend. As Joan Robinson, a British economist, memorably put it: “Whatever you can rightly say about India, the opposite is also true.” For those new to the country and for old hands, the selection below is a primer—or a refresher—to some 3,000 years of a land of multitudes.
Mahabharata. By C. Rajagopalachari. Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan; 484 pages; $17.90 and £13.50
Along with the Ramayana, the Mahabharata is one of Hinduism’s two great epics. At its heart, it is the story of a familial struggle over the throne. The Kauravas are the 100 sons of the blind king Dhritarashtra. Their cousins, the Pandavas, are a set of five brothers. The story concludes with the battle of Kurukshetra, with one family emerging victorious. The names, events and places in the Mahabharata infuse everyday speech in India, and stories from within it serve as go-to analogies in much the same way that anglophone culture is permeated by lines from Shakespeare and the Bible. The Bhagavad Gita, among Hinduism’s holiest scriptures, comes from a section of the Mahabharata in which the god Krishna and Arjuna, one of the Pandava brothers, discuss the morality of war. All of which makes the Mahabharata an important text to understand India. But there are two bigger reasons to read it: the first is the insight it provides into the thinking of a culture used to contradictions, multiplicity and shape-shifting. Gods are often benevolent, sometimes vindictive and always all-too-human; characters can be mortal, divine or something in between, or they can be women and rivers; and it is never quite clear where the lines lie between black and white. The second reason, though, is the more persuasive: the Mahabharata is a lot of fun to read. The version listed here is a translation by C. Rajagopalachari, a freedom-fighter who served as governor-general in the brief period between independence and 1950, when India became a republic. His translation, as he writes in the preface to the first edition (published in 1950), was to offer India’s children “in easy prose the story of the Mahabharata that we, more fortunate in this than they, heard in our homes as children”.
India in the Persianate Age: 1000-1765. By Richard M. Eaton Penguin; 512 pages; $39.95 and £30
For some 200 years, historians have categorised India’s history into three discrete periods: Hindu, Muslim and British, or ancient-medieval-modern. Such neat divisions are of course humbug. Richard M. Eaton, an American historian at the University of Arizona, and the author of many books on Islam in India, takes on this tripartite fantasy with this masterful look at nearly a millennium of Indian history. India stood at the centre of an eastward-looking Sanskrit world, spreading its influence throughout Asia, especially Indochina (the kings of Thailand still call themselves Rama, after the god in the Ramayana; its ancient capital, Ayutthaya, was named after Rama’s home in India, Ayodhya; the famous Angkor Wat temples of Cambodia were built as Hindu places of worship). And present-day Iran and parts of Central Asia were the locus of the Persianate world, which blended pre-Islamic Iranian culture with that of Arab Islam. India was where these overlapped. “Much of India’s history between 1000-1800,” the period traditionally thought of as the country’s Islamic period, “can be understood in terms of the prolonged and multifaceted interaction between the Sanskrit and Persianate worlds”, Mr Eaton argues. The book (which we reviewed in 2021), is two things in one: it is a relatively straightforward chronicle of eight centuries of Indian history, a period that gave rise to many things thought of today as quintessentially Indian, from biryani to the Hindi language. And it offers powerful evidence, backed up with hundreds of examples from Professor Eaton’s scholarship, that Indians before the arrival of the British saw each other and themselves not through the lens of religion, as the leaders of the country today would have their citizens believe, but through the varifocals of language, ethnicity and community.
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Inglorious Empire: What the British did to India. By Shashi Tharoor. Hurst Publishers; 296 pages; £10.99 and $17.95
It is not uncommon to encounter, among a certain class of English gentleman, the notion that, on balance, India did not do so badly from British rule. Not only were Indians spared the horrors of French or Spanish—or, worse, Belgian—colonisation. But the British built the railways, the postal system and the administrative infrastructure of the country. They left behind the gifts of parliamentary democracy and the English language. In under 300 pages, Shashi Tharoor, a former under-secretary-general of the UN and a serving member of parliament in India, demolishes those arguments. Mr Tharoor takes aim, in turn, at the many sins of empire, from draining India of its resources and destroying its industry, to the manner in which the British implemented a policy of divide-and-rule, giving rise to conflict between Hindus and Muslims, which ultimately led to the partition of India and Pakistan and whose repercussions are more acutely felt with each passing day. As for the railways, post and industrialisation, he asks, “Why would India, which throughout its history had created some of the greatest (and most modern for their time) civilisations the world has ever known, not have acquired all the trappings of developed or advanced nations today, had it been left to itself to do so?”
India after Gandhi. By Ramachandra Guha. Macmillan; 960 pages; £20 and $24.99
The history syllabus of the national curriculum adhered to by the Mumbai school attended by your correspondent more or less stopped with 1947, when India achieved independence. What followed was a desultory section on “world development since 1945” covering highlights such as the Marshall Plan, the Bay of Pigs crisis, and the creation of international organisations of varying utility, including the Non-Aligned Movement, the Association of South-East Asian Nations and the South Asian Association for Regional Co-operation. Independence was where Indian history ended, both in schools and for many historians. The publication, in 2007 (updated in 2017), by Ramachandra Guha of “India after Gandhi” filled that gap. As if to make up for the absence, it runs to nearly 1,000 pages, by far the chunkiest tome on this list. It is not a slog. Mr Guha, India’s pre-eminent historian and a lively writer, starts with partition and the assassination, less than six months later, of Mahatma Gandhi. His admiration of Jawaharlal Nehru, Gandhi’s peer, India’s first and longest-serving prime minister, and, for better and worse, the architect of modern India, is apparent, as is his distaste for Nehru’s daughter, Indira Gandhi, who ran the country for 13 years as an elected prime minister and, for two years in the 1970s, as a dictatorship. Mr Guha is a humanist and secularist, and a noisy critic of Narendra Modi, the current prime minister. To understand the dangerous path down which Mr Modi’s Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party is leading India, it is crucial to first appreciate the legacy that it is rejecting. If you read only one book from this list, make it Mr Guha’s.
Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity. By Katherine Boo. Penguin Random House; 288 pages; £9.99 and $15.99
and
The Billionaire Raj: A Journey Through India’s New Gilded Age. By James Crabtree. Penguin Random House; 416 pages; £9.99 and $17
Mumbai is in many ways unlike the rest of India: it is far richer, less caste-bound and a lot more easy-going. Yet it is also all of India in a single place. As the country’s commercial capital, it has long attracted migrants from all over the country. Most of India’s communities, languages and cuisines are represented here, if not all of its pathologies. The cliché about Mumbai is that it is a place of extreme contrasts: sprawling shantytowns nestled in the shadows of multi-million-dollar homes. Like all clichés, there is more than a pinch of truth to this. Every day, hundreds of men and women arrive in Mumbai to make new lives for themselves. Some succeed. Many don’t. The books by James Crabtree and Katherine Boo offer glimpses of both sides of the coin. They are best read as a pair.
Ms Boo, who has written about poverty in America for the New Yorker and is married to an Indian, had long visited Mumbai and found herself wondering why the shocking deprivation on open display in the city was allowed to persist. She spent several years reporting from a single slum in search of an answer. “The result,” The Economist wrote in its review, “is a staggering work of reporting and storytelling.” Ms Boo follows two families as they confront vengeful neighbours, corrupt officials, crooked cops and frequent death to portray unflinchingly life at the bottom of the heap.
Mr Crabtree, a former Mumbai bureau chief for the Financial Times, spent his Mumbai years in what Ms Boo calls the “overcity”. Most books by departing foreign correspondents tend to be tedious things, snapshots from their years of reporting tied together with a tenuous grand theme. Mr Crabtree, on the other hand, has a laser-sharp focus on India’s mega-rich, and how they got there. He explains with great clarity the links between big Indian business and politics, and the implications for India’s industrial economy. Even so, India is no post-Soviet Russia. The historical analogy Mr Crabtree uses instead is America in the era of the Rockefellers and Vanderbilts. In America, it gave way to a progressive era of greater prosperity for all, he writes. The fate of nearly 1.4bn people hangs on whether India makes a similar journey.■
约200年来，历史学家将印度的历史分为三个独立的时期。印度教、穆斯林和英国，或古代-中世纪-现代。这种整齐划一的划分当然是虚伪的。亚利桑那大学的美国历史学家理查德-M-伊顿（Richard M. Eaton），以及许多关于印度伊斯兰教的书籍的作者，通过这本书对印度近一千年的历史进行了精湛的研究，对这种三分法的幻想提出了质疑。印度站在一个东向的梵文世界的中心，将其影响扩散到整个亚洲，尤其是印度支那（泰国的国王仍然以《罗摩衍那》中的神的名字自称罗摩；其古都大城，以罗摩在印度的家阿约提亚命名；柬埔寨著名的吴哥窟寺庙是作为印度教的礼拜场所建造的）。而今天的伊朗和中亚部分地区是波斯世界的所在地，它将前伊斯兰教的伊朗文化与阿拉伯伊斯兰教的文化相融合。印度是这些文化重叠的地方。伊顿先生认为，"印度在1000-1800年之间的大部分历史，"即传统上被认为是该国的伊斯兰时期，"可以从梵语和波斯语世界之间长期和多方面的互动来理解"。这本书（我们在2021年对其进行了评论）集两方面的内容于一身：它是一部相对简单的印度八个世纪的历史编年史，这一时期产生了许多今天被认为是典型的印度事物，从比里亚尼到印地语。它提供了强有力的证据，并以伊顿教授的学术研究中的数百个例子为依据，表明在英国人到来之前，印度人不是通过宗教的视角来看待彼此和自己，就像今天的国家领导人希望他们的公民相信的那样，而是通过语言、种族和社区的变色镜来看待彼此和自己。
